I am both a (T-)SQL expert and a language design enthusiast. IMO, SQL the language is mediocre in its grammar and extremely resistant to cleanliness. Once you get past that, the things you can actually do with it are extremely useful.

I’d love for a better syntax to exist, but it’s a Herculean task to make one. Modern SQL dialects have gargantuan, labyrinthine grammars, and they grow with each new product version. It’s a lot easier to keep adding to that than to build a feature-complete replacement. This is also the reason why most ORMs are so frustratingly limiting: it’s too much work to support the advanced features of one SQL dialect, let alone multiple.